Uropi is an International Auxiliary language created by Joel Landais. It is a synthesis of all the common points that can be found in Indo-European languages. Its main characteristics are simplicity, internationality and transparency

Otto Jespersen, the great Danish linguist (1860 - 1943) studied in Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin and Oxford, and graduated in English, French and Latin. Later on he specialized in phonetics and the English language. He collabored with the linguists Paul Passy and Henry Sweettook a great interest in International Auxiliary Languages (IALs). From 1907 onwards, he participated in the "Delegation for the adoption of an InternationalLanguage" that created Ido, but broke away from Ido to present his own auxiliary language project: Novial in 1928. He also collaborated with Alice Vanderbilt Morris, Edward Sapir, etc., on the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) that came up with Interlingua in 1951.

His introduction to Novial "An International Language" published in 1928 http://fr.feedbooks.com/userbook/14934 is particularly interesting insofar as it presents, compares and criticizes the main constructed languages existing at the time: Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Latino sine Flexione, Idiom Neutral, Occidental…, he describes their advantages and their drawbacks which he endeavors to avoid in Novial. Of course he coudn't analyze Interlingua that came out in 1951, that is 8 years after he died.

We shall deal here with these languages, comparing them with Novial and Uropi, and naturally we will quote Jespersen extensively. It is most interesting to observe that many of his points of view, criticisms and proposals are very much like ours; we could even say that Jespersen paved the way leading to Uropi. Even if we do not agree on all those points, there is little doubt that Universalglot, Novial and Uropi are three different stages on the same path.

We should first bear in mind that the time when Jespersen lived and created Novial - that is the 20's, 30's, 40's - was very different from ours.

Linguistically, the influence of Latin was still very strong: all high school students learned it, it was used in church, and was widespread in all intellectual circles. As far as IAL's are concerned, Esperanto was still very new and enjoyed a high reputation, in spite of the fact that all the attempts at reforming it had failed and that the conservatives had won, and that many other constructed language projects were born, like Ido (that was created between 1907 and 1912 by Louis de Beaufront and Louis Couturat), Idiom Neutral, Latino sine Flexione… not to mention Universalglot and Volapük which came out before Esperanto. This was a time when passionate debates and discussions on the issue of IAL's took place, a time when international conferences were organized and associations like the Délégation pour l'adoption d'une Langue Auxiliaire Internationale were founded. Jespersen was interested in all those constructed languages, but as a linguist, he soon became aware of the defects of Esperanto; he also broke away from Ido in the late 20s and presented Novial in 1928.

Today, on the other hand, the main linguistic influence internationally is that of English.

On the political front, it was a period of unrest. Germany was shaken by uprisings like that of the Spartakists in January 1919, and witnessed the Nazis' ever-growing power until Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933. Fascism had already been in power in Italy since 1922, and in Russia, after the Bolchevik revolution and the civil war, Stalinism was gradually asserting its supremacy. Apart from North America, only a few Western European countries were democracies. Yet Western Europe was not limited to a "few countries": it also meant powerful world-scale empires: the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Spanish Empire which had already broken up, but where Castilian had replaced the local languages everywhere.

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De kamb Kentauris id Lapidis, Muzea Olimpiu

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Thus it is not surprising that Jespersen created his Novial for Western Europe - as he recognizes himself, when he mentions the words "known all over that part of the world where European civilization has penetrated". Consequently, the influence of German and the Germanic languages (with the exception of English) on Novial is rather limited (for ex. there are only 8 prepositions out of 47 that are Germanic, and only 3: an, hinter, dank are German) in Uropi, of 40 prepositions, 16 are of Romance, 16 of Germanic, 8 of Slavic, 5 Of Greek origin…*); the Slavic influence on Novial is practically nonexistent, and, quite surprisinly, that of Greek is very rare.

In his introduction to Novial,"An International Language" published in 1928, Jespersen makes highly interesting remarks, most of which seem to be justifications of Uropi long beforehand.

First he observes that language differences are above all a problem for Europeans:

"An American may travel from Boston to San Francisco without hearing more than one language. But if he were to traverse the same distance on this side of the Atlantic, he would have a totally different story to tell. Suppose he started from Oslo and journeyed to the South or South-East: he would then hear perhaps Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Czecho-Slovakian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, and then in Egypt Arabic and a little English - twelve different languages, of which the majority would be utterly unintelligible to him. And yet he would not have heard half of the languages spoken in Europe".

Nowadays, we would have to add two more languages: Slovak and Hebrew, and of course, Jespersen did not know the European Union with its 29 member-states and its 24 official languages.

Why not choose an existing language ? (like English, for instance)

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This is not the right solution "…for such a choice would mean an enormous handicapping of all other nations. … It is not very pleasant to be engaged in a discussion that interests you, if you feel that while you have the best arguments the other man has the whip hand of you, because the conversation is in his native language, in which you are able to express only what you can, while he can say everything he wants to."

And to the nation itself, whose language has been chosen,"it would be a doubtful boon to see its beloved tongue mutilated and trampled under foot everywhere, as would inevitably be the result."

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I have personally given dozens of examples of English being distorted by all the peoples on earth to such an extent that it is often unintelligible; I'm not going to give them here. At the same time, you feel there is always a certain degree of contempt towards those "foreigners" who are unable to pronounce the language properly, resulting in a kind of hierarchy between "good" foreigners and "bad" foreigners. There is also "that unpleasant feeling of inferiority which (you) must always have when trying to write a serious book or paper in a foreign national language."

"International" businessmen often told me that it was much more difficult for them to speak English with Britons or Americans than with non-native speakers because, first, they understand them much better, but above all, they find themselves on an equal footing; they have the same relation to the language. This is a further argument in favour of a constructed language which is equal for all.

We should also add that the choice of a national language gives native speakers, enormous economic advantages. I am not simply referring to the production of textbooks and teaching material required to learn the language, but also to the fact that using the language enables those nations to impose their culture and their products, and of course their cultural products (films, books, series, music…) much more easily.

Latin ?

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Latin would undoubtedly have the advantage of being a neutral language, but "Even classical scholars use Latin very little nowadays in their scientific papers. And outside their narrow circles very few people are now able to read, still less to speak or write, Latin in spite of the great number of hours devoted to that language in many schools". Jespersen wrote that in 1928, and the situation is far worse today when students learning Latin are becoming increasingly rare.

"The decisive reason, however, why we must oppose the adoption of one of the existing languages, living or dead, is that each of them is several times more difficult than a constructed language need be".

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U kapèl in Kapsali, Kitera, Grecia

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Objections to constructed languages

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People often say that "such a language must be as lifeless as a dead herring", that it can never be as good as natural languages, that it can't be "as elegant as French, not as vigorous as German, not as beautiful as Italian, not as full of nuances as Russian, not as "homelike" as our mother-tongue". But all these good qualities are found only when those languages are spoken or written by natives. So that our constructed interlanguage "may very well be richer than the English spoken by a Frenchman, more elegant than French as spoken by a Dane, more vigorous than the German of some Italians, more beautiful than the Italian of the English, more full of nuances than the Russian of Germans, and more homelike than my own tongue spoken by Russians".

And above all, we should insist on the fact that an international auxiliary language doesn't mean "To one human race, one language" as the mottos of Volapük: "Menade bal, püki bal", and Esperanto: "Unu mondo, unu lingvo"proclaim, but rather what another inventor of an artificial language ("Langue bleue"), Bollack, took as his motto: "The second language to everybody".

The various constructed languages

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A man constructing an artificial language must be prepared constantly to state his reasons why such and such an idea is to be expressed in this way rather than in any other way.

The problem with Volapük is that nearly everything rests on the "individual fancies or whims of its inventor". And although most of the words are taken from European languages, when you see a page of Volapük, you can hardly recognize a single word of it. Because of very strict rules (for example R has been banned, S is exclusively reserved to the plural…etc.), fire becomes fil, red becomes led, rose becomes lol, Italy Täl, England Nelij…etc.

Esperanto is a great step forward, because it does away with verb endings indicating person and number. However, its endings are just as arbitrary as those of Volapük, although they are clearer and less numerous. Zamenhof took most of his words from the vocabulary common to Romance languages and English, but he didn't follow any fixed principles either in his selection or in his phonetic treatment of words. "it is easy to see now that it (Esperanto) is far from being perfect".

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Liovikeb, Muzea Olimpiu

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From the outset, the first Esperantists criticized certain aspects of the language: "the circumflexed letters, thefanciful"correlative" words, the accusative", the aj, oj, uj, ajn, ojn, ujn endings…etc. Zamenhof himself was not opposed to the reforms proposed in 1894, but the more conservative elements among Esperantists - who were not very numerous at the time - got the upper hand, and the "Fundamento" became something that couldn't be touched, at any cost: netuŝebleco, intangibility, as they put it.

Natural words can be modified in Esperanto, not quite so violently as in Volapük, but still without any scruples. For example the French conjunction car, which could neither become kar, because kara means "dear", nor car, because caro pronounced "tsaro" means "tsar", became ĉar "char", which has nothing to do with the French word anymore. The words edzino (wife) was borrowed from the (distorted) end of the German word Kronprinzessin (Crown Princess), hence edzo (husband) and edziĝi (to marry), that are totally arbitrary and artificial. But the worst is perhaps a word like ĝistiamajn = previous, which is a compound of ĝis = till, up to + tiam = then + the adjective endings in the plural and in the accusative: a, j, n, as if we had in English uptothenly for previous.

The propaganda for Esperanto was so energetic that the man in the street identified the very notion of "international language with Esperanto", which has been, and still is highly damaging to the idea of an interlanguage "for any one seeing Esperanto and realizing that this cannot possibly be the world-language of the future will be tempted to draw the erroneous conclusion that no such language will ever be adopted".

This is also what our experience at the Toulouse Languages Forum showed us: people often came and told us: "There was that language… which didn't work… What was it called again ? - Esperanto ? - Yes, that's it…"

Idiom Neutral's key idea was that "the task was not so much to invent a language as to find out what is already in international use, and to utilize that to the utmost extent … The result was a language that could be read with comparative ease by every educated person."This is the method used in Uropi, which compares between 30 and 40 Indo-European (and non-Indo- European) languages. But the terms selected (the most international ones) have to adapt to the Uropi phonotactics not to end up with something like: "non dass el yazik byl adopted überall, ma dass el man in el ulica identified el notion de international yazik mit esperanto…", which would be a horrible barbarous mishmash.

For example, the common Indo-European root *h2ebōl gave the word apple in 29 ancient and modern languages, whereas pomme and poma are found in two languages only (French and Catalan, 3 if you include Latin). Yet, it would be impossible, in Uropi, to choose the Swedish word äpple, or German Apfel, or Polish jabłko; on the other hand, the Uropi term could be something like: abel, apel, abol, apol… this is why we have chosen apel which is very close to the Dutch appel.

Similarly, the word rod (root) stems from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) *wr(ha)d- which gave Latin radix, It radice, Sp raíz, Rom rădăcină, Fr racine, and also Greek riza, English root, Da rod, Nor, Swe rot, Ice rót, Du wortel, G Wurzel. We have therefore chosen the Danish term rod, which possesses both the r-d in radice, radix… and the ro-/-or- that can be found in Scandinavian and in Du wortel, and also in the Slavic term koren (of different origin).

Uropi words are never selected at random.

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Ido was born because many people were dissatisfied with an Esperanto that was impossible to reform. Under the leadership of the French philosopher Louis Couturat, the "Délégation pour l'adoption d'un langue auxiliaire internationale" appointed a Committee, whose eminent members (among whom Otto Jespersen), one day found on their tables a new project written by Ido. This was the work of one of the leading French Esperantists, Louis de Beaufront, and this is where the fratricidal war between Esperantists and Idists began.

According to Jespersen, the Idists' greatest mistake was that its framers did not choose as their motto, paraphrasing Dante "Lasciate ogni Esperanto, voi ch'entrate", i.e. "Abandon all Esperanto, you who enter here". Although I'm no Ido specialist, my personal feeling is that Ido has retained too many defects of Espéranto - for example an incredible profusion of suffixes, that are not absolutely necessary - and in any case not particularly easy to use - and it even added a few more.

The main avantage of Latino sine flexione developped by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano is (for those who have studied Latin) to be able to read it "without being bothered with irregular verbs and difficult rules of syntax"; this is largely a delusion because, as Jespersen says: "though I have read a good deal of Latin in my life, I have found sentences which I could not make out except by translating them into the mother-tongue of the writer". And he adds: "this may be all very well for those who have learnt Latin, even if they have forgotten most of it; but what about the majority who have never had the benefit of a classical education?".

Occidental, created by Edgar de Wahl in 1922, takes up suffixes already used in the existing modern languages, essentially in western European languages, and does away with all the artificial elements that can be found in the other constructed languages. But his endeavour to use only natural forms leads de Wahl to abandon ease and regularity, admitting in many cases two root-forms for the same word, such as vid and vision (for "see"). This makes Occidental inevitably more complicated: a constructed language should be essentially easier than natural languages: "perfect regularity and perfect naturalness cannot possibly be combined, we must compromise here and there ".

Jespersen greatly admired Jean Pirro's constructed language: Universal glot. He wrote: "I must here especially mention Pirro, whose book written in 1868 (that is 11 years before Volapük: 1879 and 19 years before Esperanto: 1887) is very little known, but is one to which I constantly recur with the greatest admiration, because it embodies principles which were not recognized till much later".

I'm sending you a grammar and a dictionary of a new language called Universal Glot. In the futre I will always write to you in this language. I beg you to reply also in this language. Write legibly. I'm cordially greeting you.

For me, the main drawback of Universal Glot is that there are too many consonant clusters that are difficult to read and to pronounce. For example: hastlit, andistruktli, adproksen, skriptlit, lektlit. Uropi is much easier to pronounce, as you can see with the Uropi equivalents of the above-mentioned words: hastim, andistruli, anero, skrivim, lislim(hurriedly, indestructible, to approach, in writing, legibly). Uropi could be considered as a simplification of Universal Glot.

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A simpler language

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Jespersen quoted Dr Henry Sweet (1845-1912), a British linguist, specialized in German, phonetics and old English who wrote:

"It seems clear that the ideal way of constructing an a posteriori language would be to make the root-words monosyllabic, and build up the whole vocabulary on them". It should have "the maximum of internationality in the root-words", and "the grammar should be thoroughly recast on the same principle of the maximum internationality as the vocabulary…and much simpler and less tricky than that of Esperanto. Esperanto cannot be reformed: it would fall to pieces … The general principles of word-order and syntax generally should be based on English and French … accusative shown by position, not by inflection; definite and indefinite articles preserved, but used as in English, etc.".

It seems that with a 100 years' anticipation, Dr Sweet is describing Uropi.

According to Jespersen, the best international auxiliarylanguage is that "which in every point offers the greatest facility to the greatest number "…"It is, however, very important to remember that the facility of which we speak here is not merely the superficial facility, with which a printed message can be understood at first sight"…"An irregularly formed word may be extremely easy of comprehension to anyone who has it in his own language or who knows it from another language with which he happens to be familiar, but it may at the same time be very difficult to anybody else, much more difficult than a regular formation employing a suffix he has learnt once for all and which can be applied to a number of words".

Of course, there may be one or two exceptions, "as a matter of fact, not a single constructed language is totally exempt from exceptions, not even Esperanto".

Jespersen concludes saying that "there is a real need for a constructed interlanguage … when details in proposed interlanguages are criticized, it is nearly always because they are unnatural, i.e. deviate more than necessary from what is found in existing languages … or else because they are unnecessarily complicated in their grammatical structure …".

All this "the reader will say, is a far-off dream. Quite so, but then …most of the best things we now possess began by being dreams." Without the dream of Icarus, who wanted to fly, could we really be travelling by plane today and sending rockets to the moon ot the Planet Mars ?